BENGALURU: In what can be termed as a spirit of innovation and aspiration, a team of five students from the Government Boys High School in Malleswaram, Bengaluru will represent India at the ‘FIRST Global Challenge (FGC) Robotics Olympics’ to be held in Panama on October 29. Coming from homes where parents work as housekeeping staff, garment workers, and civil contractors, access to high-end technology or private coaching was never an option for them. But what they lacked in resources, they made up for it through curiosity and unrelenting drive to learn.
Gouresh K, GN Chandan Raj, Ningaraj, Parashuram M and Arjun K Raj were handpicked to be trained and groomed to participate in the FGC Robotics Olympics. Gouresh, a Class 10 student, said, “We have Atal Tinkering Lab (ATL) at our school and it was a big advantage. We would spend hours learning robotics, coding, AI and others at the lab.
We also got support from Amazon Future Engineer Makerspace Lab, run by the Innovation Story. It is a physical, free-of-cost facility in Bengaluru to help students receive hands-on training in robotics, AI and others. It added fuel to our dreams to create something new that could solve real world problems.”
The theme of FIRST Global Challenge is ‘Eco Equilibrium’, focusing on maximising biodiversity, protecting species, restoring habitats and maintaining ecological balance.
Akhil Menon, mentor for the project, said, “Each member of the team brings a distinct strength, including mechanical design, coding, electronics and strategic thinking. Ningaraj and Arjun led mechanical design and CAD modeling, Gouresh handled Arduino programming and app integration, Chandan brought the circuits to life with electronics work and Parashuram, with an eye for control and intuition, became the team’s official driver and UI tester.”
Explaining their robot, Gouresh said, “Components required to build this high-quality robot were all provided by the FGC. We can’t add our own components in this robot, they will be tested and examined once we reach Panama. It took us six months to build this robot and work on its systematic functioning. It showcases remarkable versatility — it can collect both large and small game balls, launch them to heights of up to 3 metre and climb a rope to a height of 2 metre with precision.
It is built in a way embedding FGC’s principle, cooperation and competition. Therefore, it assists other robots to climb. This Olympics is such that we must work with other teams and help their robots overcome barriers with the help of our robot.”
